The Poison Empress's Fury and Hwarin's Price
"Even if I devoted myself to training here in the Tang Clan for the rest of my days, I could never say when I might reach my goal. And you would send her to the Moyong Clan at the far edge of the east? What nonsense is this?!"
The Poison Martial Empress, Tang Ok-ran, berated the Clan Head with a face full of fury.
She had chased him all the way to the Patriarch Hall because her disciple had misplaced the third volume of Tangga Pungun somewhere. Never had she imagined she would walk in on an order this absurd.
The Poison Empress had been waiting outside the Clan Head's office when she heard what was being discussed inside, and she could no longer hold her tongue.
"A poison of the Tang Clan has poisoned the Clan Head of the Moyong family. This could very easily become a grave problem for the entire Murim."
To calm her, Tang Baek-ho gave a brief account of what had transpired with the Moyong Clan.
"A family's troubles should be settled by that family's elders. To put forward a child who has suffered her whole life because of the Tang Clan—there are things even a Clan Head must not say!"
"I know. But is there truly no other way?"
"Say the child does go, as you propose. It would take a year and a half, perhaps. And when she returns and another poisoned soul from some other family comes knocking—will you send her out again then?"
"……"
The Clan Head could not easily answer.
"As Clan Head, I understand your sense of duty fully. But I have not forgotten the words you spoke when you came to the Forbidden Garden—that you wished to fulfill your duty as a father."
The Clan Head's words were right, and so were the Poison Empress's.
Ordering Tang Hwa-rin to make such a long journey was undeniably harsh. But from the standpoint of the family rather than the individual, it was another matter entirely.
The Sichuan Tang Clan was a family that wielded poison, and it had always walked carefully. The fact that a Tang poison had leaked beyond their walls and poisoned the head of the Moyong Clan could send shockwaves through the whole of Murim.
The Poison Empress, too, understood the situation, and once her anger had settled, she brought up the visit the Clan Head had paid to the Forbidden Garden in person a few months before.
He had said that while the family mattered, he wished for Hwa-rin to be treated first as his daughter-in-law rather than as a Poison Human. It had been said half in earnest, half in hope.
"Poison Empress……"
"I ask you to withdraw the order."
The Poison Empress bowed her head with formal courtesy to the Clan Head. It was an apology for the disrespect she had just shown him—but it was also a plea, made as Tang Hwa-rin's master.
Even if Tang Baek-ho's order were framed as a request, so long as he was the Clan Head, Tang Hwa-rin could not refuse it.
By standing as Tang Baek-ho's great-aunt and as Hwa-rin's master, Tang Ok-ran had created the very atmosphere in which refusal became possible.
"In the worst case, the young Clan Head of the Moyong family may be a lackey of the Demonic Cult. If that is so, then through the Tang Clan's poison, the entire Moyong family could fall into the Demonic Cult's hands."
Faced with the Poison Empress's attitude, Tang Baek-ho reluctantly brought out the circumstances he had not yet shared, his face troubled.
"The young Clan Head could be a Demonic Cult agent? Then who sent the Moyong party here in the first place?"
Startled by the unexpected news, the Poison Empress stared at the Clan Head.
"It was Moyong Sang-ah, the only daughter of Clan Head Moyong Cheon, who sent them."
"Moyong Sang-ah?"
The Poison Empress tilted her head at the unfamiliar name.
She rarely left the Forbidden Garden, and even when she did, she never ventured beyond the Tang Clan's walls, so the name meant nothing to her.
It was her disciple who kept up with the rumors instead.
"Moyong Sang-ah? The Female Mantis?"
Tang Hwa-rin frowned at a name she had heard before.
"Yes. In the Jianghu they call her the Mantid Maiden—not so much an epithet as an insult, really. Ah, but Hwa-rin, I have not yet heard your own thoughts. What is it you wish to do?"
Tang Hwa-rin looked at the Clan Head, who was asking her opinion with an apologetic air.
She understood the situation well enough by now.
As a martial artist of the Sichuan Tang Clan, would she race to the far eastern wilds of Liaodong to thwart the Demonic Cult's scheme and clean up the mess Tang Geohu had made? Or would she devote herself to her training, for the sake of the fiancé waiting for her in Yichang?
Tang Hwa-rin had been weighing the elders' words this way and that—but a single fact tipped the scales in her heart entirely.
"No."
The fact that the person who sent the request was Moyong Sang-ah. Tang Hwa-rin refused in a voice like iron.
"You want me to help the woman who ate her husband? No."
A long silence settled over the Patriarch Hall. Paying the silence no mind, Tang Hwa-rin revealed her true nature for the first time in ages.
"Hwa-rin."
"What? Did I say something wrong?"
Even after the Head of the Medical Pavilion warned her about her foul language, she showed no intention of stopping. A strange hostility had settled over her face.
"I've heard the rumors too, more or less."
Eui-gak-ju was considerably flustered by her reaction, but to Tang Hwa-rin, her hostility was only natural.
"Some of us have to train for ten years just to spend our wedding night with our fiancé—and that Female Mantis supposedly cut her own husband's head off on theirs."
Tang Hwa-rin had trained ten years for her wedding night; Moyong Sang-ah was the woman who had beheaded her husband on theirs.
Stories so utterly opposite. Tang Hwa-rin could not help but resent a woman who stood at nearly her exact opposite.
"From what I hear, the husband was a great traitor of Joseon."
Hoping to turn her heart, if only a little, Eui-gak-ju offered the facts as the world knew them.
"So what? He was still her husband. She could have taken his hand and run. She could have sheltered a husband from a foreign land. Is that what a wife does?"
His defense only stoked her anger. Tang Hwa-rin gave a scornful snort, as if the very idea were absurd.
"……"
"Yoon-ho came to the Tang Clan for me, knowing he might die. Even when he told me to forget him and marry someone better, he said he'd wait for me. And now I'm supposed to make time for a woman who killed her husband to save her own skin? Time I could spend seeing Yoon-ho again?"
Tang Hwa-rin's chest seethed. A Joseon husband. A wedding night. Betrayal and trust. The stories were strangely alike and yet utterly different, which only made it worse.
She laid it all bare, hiding nothing. Had she not been training in the Poison Qi Art, her rage would have leaked out in a slow seep of venom.
"The truth may differ from the rumors. The Demonic Cult's hand may be in it."
Eui-gak-ju defended Moyong Sang-ah once more.
"She killed her husband—that much is fact, isn't it? If she wants to cry injustice while dressed in silks and eating whatever she pleases, well, I could do that too."
Tang Hwa-rin sneered, as if such a woman were not worth her time.
"Hah! Hwa-rin."
"Enough. Clan Head. Has my disciple not made her wishes plain?"
Seeing that Eui-gak-ju had nothing left to say, and that the Poison Empress was about to chime in, the Clan Head stepped in to mediate.
"Perhaps that girl Moyong Sang-ah is a victim of the Demonic Cult, just as you are. I understand your heart, but do not dismiss her so utterly."
"……"
Tang Hwa-rin reluctantly conceded the point and nodded.
"Hwa-rin. I know I am asking something cruel of you. But there are things a Clan Head must sometimes do. That girl Moyong Sang-ah is surely a victim of Tang Geohu as well. So—could you think on it once more?"
Bearing his weight as Clan Head and as father-in-law both, Tang Baek-ho asked his daughter-in-law.
"I'll think about it."
"Don't let it weigh on you too much. Whatever you say tomorrow, I will step in and refuse for you."
Back in the Forbidden Garden, the Poison Empress sought to reassure her dejected disciple.
"Yes, Master. Thank you. And—here is volume three."
Tang Hwa-rin nodded with a forced smile, then fetched the third volume of Tangga Pungun from her room and handed it over.
The Poison Empress's face lit up at the sight of it, but mindful of the situation, she stole a glance at her disciple, unable to simply rejoice.
"Ahem. So that's where it was."
Tang Hwa-rin couldn't help smiling inwardly at her master's rare display, wished her pleasant reading, and returned to her own room.
"The Moyong Clan. From Sichuan to Liaodong……"
Tang Hwa-rin opened the window and gazed at the eastern sky.
It was so very far.
Had it been close, she would not have agonized so. To be told to travel a distance of more than a year at an age when even devoting herself wholly to training felt like too little—it was a cruelly harsh command.
And the one who had made the request displeased her as well.
"Who does she think she is, killing her own husband?"
They said she killed her husband and swallowed his entire fortune. That she had become unimaginably wealthy.
In a world where even a favored houseguest who betrayed his patron gets pointed at behind his back—she wasn't even a friend, she was his wife, and she betrayed and killed him.
It wasn't only Tang Hwa-rin; no one in the world would look kindly on such a woman.
"What is money, anyway? That's not what happiness is."
Tang Hwa-rin lay quietly on her bed and pulled the covers over herself.
The plush bed, the soft blankets, the cozy bedding welcomed her—the finest linens, prepared for the Tang Clan's Poison Human.
It was, without question, the most comfortable bed of Tang Hwa-rin's life. And yet she was not happy.
"Yoon-ho……"
Tang Hwa-rin recalled her days with her fiancé.
The scratchy blankets. The bed she had to smooth over every morning upon waking. The dusty attic. Those nights lying in bed in the deep dark, watching Yoon-ho write, utterly entranced.
For a girl raised in a wealthy house, it had been an uncomfortable bed. But those days were happier than any she had ever known.
"I miss Yoon-ho……"
She wanted to see his sleeping face. She missed the days she could gaze, spellbound, at that face—the one that would only frown in mild annoyance even when she poked his cheek, then simply drift back to sleep.
She wanted to see that half-awake face of his, the one only she was ever allowed to see.
"She kills her husband, but begs for her father's life?"
If she knew how precious her parents were, how could she not know a husband could be precious too?
It made her angry all over again. Even without money, you can be happy with the one you love beside you—and that woman doesn't even know such happiness.
Tang Hwa-rin could not sleep, unsettled by the feeling churning in her.
"Does she really have circumstances of her own?"
However harshly she thought of the woman, she could not bring herself to think of her as pure evil—she was, after all, a stranger. Her thoughts, before she knew it, had drifted all the way to the roots of all evil.
"Tang Geohu, and the Demonic Cult……"
Had her life truly been ruined by Tang Geohu and the Demonic Cult?
Just like hers.
What misunderstanding could there possibly be? She killed her husband. What is there to misunderstand? Tang Hwa-rin kept dwelling on Moyong Sang-ah—someone who shared her story yet stood at its very opposite.
"What would Yoon-ho have done?"
She didn't need to think long.
"Ugh. Yoon-ho."
An affectionate voice slipped from Tang Hwa-rin's lips.
She could imagine exactly what he would have said, and it made her want to smack him once across the back of the head. Of course, she'd have taken his hand afterward and jumped into the fire pit with him too.
After long deliberation, Tang Hwa-rin finally made up her mind.
"I'll help."
The next day, Tang Hwa-rin went to the Patriarch Hall with her master and said so.
"What did you just say?!"
"Well thought. I shall assemble the Tang Clan's finest to prepare for any eventuality."
Before the Poison Empress could even recover from her shock, the Clan Head hurried to make arrangements.
"I didn't say I was going to the Moyong Clan."
Tang Hwa-rin shook her head, as if both of them had gotten it wrong.
"You said you would help—yet you have no intention of going?"
She was hardly one to play with words. The Clan Head demanded a further explanation from his daughter-in-law.
"I will make the antidote."
It was the conclusion Tang Hwa-rin had reached after a sleepless night of deliberation.
"The antidote?"
"My body holds the very poison that was used on the young Clan Head. And I have already mastered the method of neutralizing it."
The poison qi that had poisoned the young Clan Head flickered briefly in Tang Hwa-rin's hand—then vanished in an instant.
"Heh. They call it the Realm of Ten Thousand Poisons Impenetrable, and still it astonishes me anew."
To think she carried within her body the very poison they had believed neutralized. The Clan Head and Eui-gak-ju could not help marveling once more at the power of a Poison Human.
"With my ability, the research notes Tang Geohu left behind, and the help of the Head of the Medical Pavilion and my master, an antidote is nothing. I can make it in no time."
To control the poison qi within another's body, and to grasp and compound the antidote to an absorbed poison in a heartbeat—
It was an art only a fully perfected Poison Human could perform, unique in all the world of Murim.
"Truly. Rather than moving every time Tang Geohu's poison brings harm to the Central Plains, making antidotes is the wiser course."
Tang Baek-ho nodded at a solution he had never once imagined.
"I too will help, if the Poison Empress consents. However, far too much time has passed since Clan Head Moyong Cheon was poisoned. Whether the antidote will still work is an open question."
While agreeing with Tang Hwa-rin's proposal, Eui-gak-ju could not hide his worry.
"If it truly doesn't work, then I'll agonize over whether to go to the Moyong Clan then. No matter how far away it is, sending word alone can be done quickly, can't it?"
Mere communication could be shortened to almost nothing with carrier pigeons or relay couriers.
"Good. If it can be done that way, all the better."
"Clan Head. Then I will begin preparations at once……"
Seeing everyone present fall in behind her idea, Tang Hwa-rin smiled.
So far, this was her solution for a woman who might, just possibly, be another victim of the Demonic Cult. But she had no intention of ending her proposal here.
"That said—I have no intention of doing it for the Female Mantis for free."
"Hm?"
Tang Hwa-rin looked at the bewildered elders and curled one corner of her mouth upward.
"She has stolen even a moment of my time with Yoon-ho. So I will be collecting payment."
Tang Hwa-rin's audacious smile was, in some way or another, the very image of her fiancé.